4 ms·

China overtakes US in AI research

6 points by jonbaer 5y ago

ilamont 5y ago
The article brings up a number of good points about advances in research from China, but the article also says: In 2020, China topped the U.S. for the first time in terms of the number of times an academic article on AI is cited by others Via Nature: In China, one of the main indicators currently used to evaluate researchers, allocate funding and rank institutions is metrics collected by the Science Citation Index (SCI), a database of articles and citation records for more than 9,000 journals. Since 2009, articles in these journals written by authors from Chinese institutions increased from some 120,000 a year to 450,000 in 2019. Some institutions even pay researchers bonuses for publishing in them. These practices have incentivized researchers to publish lots of papers at the expense of quality, says Jin Xuan, a chemical engineer at Loughborough University, UK. Evidence suggests that the focus on metrics has also driven a rise in inappropriate practices, such as researchers submitting plagiarized or fraudulent papers, or inappropriately citing their own or a colleague’s work to boost citations. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00574-8#ref-CR1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00574-8#ref-CR1 Is there some other objective measure of progress in any type of research that can be used to make such comparisons?
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  > Is there some other objective measure Not when it involves China, since gamesmanship and financial incentives play the dominant role for researchers. A good analogy is the Olympics - China cares only about their gold medal count, while Americans are also interested in the various sports, bios, fitness, history, etc. Regarding AI, China is hoping their surveillance state and mass collection of data give them an advantage over the US with more available training data and applications.
- FuckButtons 5y ago
  Godharts law in action. I think the problem is less that the metric is insufficiently tolerant of being gamed, as it is the research institutions are not sufficiently policing the researchers.
908B64B197 5y ago
Here's the thing: Nobody at any top 50 AI lab reads Chinese papers. Academic fraud, machine-translations and citation rings make the signal to noise ratio to low to bother. related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28107614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28107614
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mrkramer 5y ago
And how much of that research is stolen from US?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- throw3434053 5y ago
  And how much of that is stolen from UK mathematics?
  - mrkramer 5y ago
    idk I ask you

6 points by jonbaer 5y ago

The article brings up a number of good points about advances in research from China, but the article also says: In 2020, China topped the U.S. for the first time in terms of the number of times an academic article on AI is cited by others Via Nature: In China, one of the main indicators currently used to evaluate researchers, allocate funding and rank institutions is metrics collected by the Science Citation Index (SCI), a database of articles and citation records for more than 9,000 journals. Since 2009, articles in these journals written by authors from Chinese institutions increased from some 120,000 a year to 450,000 in 2019. Some institutions even pay researchers bonuses for publishing in them. These practices have incentivized researchers to publish lots of papers at the expense of quality, says Jin Xuan, a chemical engineer at Loughborough University, UK. Evidence suggests that the focus on metrics has also driven a rise in inappropriate practices, such as researchers submitting plagiarized or fraudulent papers, or inappropriately citing their own or a colleague’s work to boost citations. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00574-8#ref-CR1 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00574-8#ref-CR1 Is there some other objective measure of progress in any type of research that can be used to make such comparisons?

redis_mlc 5y ago
> Is there some other objective measure Not when it involves China, since gamesmanship and financial incentives play the dominant role for researchers. A good analogy is the Olympics - China cares only about their gold medal count, while Americans are also interested in the various sports, bios, fitness, history, etc. Regarding AI, China is hoping their surveillance state and mass collection of data give them an advantage over the US with more available training data and applications.
FuckButtons 5y ago
Godharts law in action. I think the problem is less that the metric is insufficiently tolerant of being gamed, as it is the research institutions are not sufficiently policing the researchers.

908B64B197 5y ago

Here's the thing: Nobody at any top 50 AI lab reads Chinese papers. Academic fraud, machine-translations and citation rings make the signal to noise ratio to low to bother. related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28107614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28107614

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mrkramer 5y ago

And how much of that research is stolen from US?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throw3434053 5y ago
And how much of that is stolen from UK mathematics?
- mrkramer 5y ago
  idk I ask you